I Loved You Wednesday (5 page)

So.

While parked on the side of the road for over three hours, Chris and I fight over who is to assume command of the wheel when we get started again. Eventually, a dilapidated tow truck pulls up, and its dilapidated driver inquires whether or not we are in need of assistance.

In need of assistance?

The fellow whips out a huge five-gallon vat of gasoline, which he unloads into our thirsty tank before charging us twenty-five dollars.

But it’s not as if we can take our business elsewhere.

No.

This is clearly a seller’s market.

And so, twenty-five dollars poorer and hardly wiser for the experience, Chris and I continue our voyage north. I am at the wheel. My twenty-five fat ones bailed us out, giving me all driving rights for the duration of the ride.

Speeding down the highway several hours later, through the soft Massachusetts twilight, I tell Chris I’ve worked up a terrific appetite. So she pulls out her Zabar’s equipment and plies me with salads and sandwiches, cheeses and fruits, cookies and yogurts and a bottle of wine
and
a carton of milk
and
half a dozen dog biscuits for the kids in the back.

And when she pulls out a joint for an after-dinner smoke, I begin to have my first serious doubts that we ever really will see the Vermont border before December.

Soon it starts to rain. Raining hard, as a matter of fact. It’s pretty chilly out there, too, hinting of a change to snow.

Chris and I share the joint, and since I often forget she always carries the best dope, I am now
very
stoned ... at seventy-five miles an hour! I tell Chris I’d rather not have to play the Highway Death Toll Telethon Game, so would she mind driving for a while?

Am I kidding myself?

Mad Wheels not want to drive?

I pull over, and Chris happily leaps out of her side of the car, races around in the rain to my side, as I slide over to her seat and she plops down, very wet, on mine.

And we are off again, on our way to nowhere in particular.

We pass the next several hours singing scores to musicals we love, taking the parts we’ve always wanted to play. I do Billy Bigelow to her Julie Jordan, my J. Pierpont Finch to her Rosemary, my Tony to her Maria. And so we move on, two stoned, drunken travelers, fighting their way north, singing at the top of their lungs.

The dogs, of course, sleeping through the entire concert!

And it is not until we are somewhere deep in the middle of the lorie, cold state of Vermont, during our “People Will Say We’re in Love” duet from
Oklahoma
/, my Curly to her Laurey, as Chris peaks with a very impressive, if slightly off-key, high C, and as the heavy raindrops pelting the window beat out a cacophonous rhythm to our madness and the windshield wipers lend their support, serving as twin batons governing our pace, while all the world’s a stage, especially right now at this moment for the two of us and I get one of my frequent love rushes for Chris and want more than anything to grab and smother her with kisses, wet and sloppy, all over her neck, getting lost in a sweep of ribald passion, that the car grinds to a slow halt because, believe it or not, we have run out of gas.

Again.

Chapter Three
 

Sitting on the side of the road in the rain, biting my cuticles to shreds, I very slowly turn and ask Chris, in as casual a tone as I can muster, if she thinks it is not a bit extraordinary that we have actually run out of gasoline not once, but twice in the same day.

Chris shrugs coquettishly, which, while neither explanation nor apology, beats no response at all. So.

Out of gas again, somewhere in the sinister, dank night of Vermont in the pouring rain at nine thirty in the evening, we sit, staring at each other. It is so pitch dark out there you can’t tell where the mountains end and the skies begin. No sense my getting out and walking. We’re not near
anything!

Hostages of the state, we sit in the car and wait, speculating all the while how many hours, days or months we’ll be able to survive on our leftovers from Zabar’s.

“If things get really desperate, we can always eat the dogs,” offers Chris calmly.

“That’s a comfort.”

Now that the engine’s been silenced, the heater is no longer blowing. And it doesn’t take very long for the outside chill to penetrate. So we zipper up and button down what we’ve got on. Even the dogs are shivering in their sleep. Soon I can see vapors of my breath when I speak.

“I’m scared!” announces Chris.

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Who knows what’s lurking out there, stalking the cold night, waiting for the right moment to attack? Thieves, muggers, rapists. . .

“Traveling insurance salesmen. . . .”

“Anything. I’m frightened.”

“That’s silly, Chris. The country’s much safer than the city.”

“True?”

“True.”

“Oh.” Long pause. Then, with a heavy sigh: “What a relief!”

Now I take a long pause. “Your capacity for vacillation never fails to dazzle me.”

“Me too. I went to a medium last week who said if I don’t stop acting so strongly on momentary impulses, I’m going to ruin my life. And that was the good news.”

“What do you suppose triggers it all?”

“I don’t know, I guess I live for the moment.”

“Why not, kid? Life is a cabaret.”

“Ain’t it the truth?”

“We better get out of here soon. If Ruth doesn’t get her anticonvulsant medication, she’ll have one of her bulldog fits on us.”

“That’d be good for a tickle. Where are her pills?”

“In the trunk.”

“Maybe you should get them, Steve. It’ll give us a project. I read where a group of marooned sailors who kept busy did better than another group of marooned sailors who just sat around masturbating.”

Agreed.

So, for occupational therapy, I trek to the trunk, shivering in the wet cold, and retrieve from my suitcase Ruth’s bottle of Dilantins, ultimately administering, wrapped between two layers of bologna for enticement, her dosage of two.

Looking over at Chris, I see she has lapsed, while I was out shopping for the bologna, into one of her paralyses of intensity. Approaching her with caution, I ask, “What’s on your mind?”

“Should I go back to my analyst?” Chris asks, blankly staring out the window.

“I don’t know. Do you want to?”

“I’m not sure. You know how easily I change my mind. It’s such a commitment. And I can’t afford it. They stopped running my Arpège commercial, so I can’t live on that anymore. And he gets me so depressed sometimes. But then there are moments when he’s very bright and kind of cute and neither of us can figure out if I have a sexual fantasy attachment to him or if he’s a father figure to me or if I just feel hostility toward him because he is basically, down under all that intellectual veneer, just a creep. I don’t think he really understands me anyway, so I may as well not go back to him.”

“Well, there you are. You decided that all by yourself. I’m proud of you. Now stick to that.”

“I will. But you know he really is the only one who understands my depressions.”

“Then maybe you should go back to him.”

“But I hate him.”

“Then don’t go back to him.”

“But then again, last month, when I was down, he brought me right out of it.”

“Then go back to him.”

“But I’m not down now.”

“Then don’t go back to him.”

“You’re right. I won’t!”

“Good.”

“Maybe I’ll just go back once. Get a feeler.”

“All right. Do that.”

“Naw. Fuck him. I won’t go back.” She shrugs. “All he probably wants is my body anyway.”

Two more hours pass while Chris and I alternately change her mind, doze, chat and nibble. Ruth’s snoring soon reaches sonic boom proportions, and Harry retaliates by releasing one of his gas attacks on us.

“If Harry doesn’t stop teeing off, we’ll all soon be asphyxiated,” observes Chris.

“Why don’t we open a window?” I offer.

“Are you crazy? It’s too cold. Freezing could be detrimental to our health.”

“Would you rather be nauseous?”

“I’d rather be neither, Steve. Why don’t we just throw the farting dog out of the car?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I tell her. “The weather’s changing.
¹
’

“What?”

“Look outside.”

Chris looks. “It isn’t!”

“It is!”

“It isn’t!”

“Put on the lights.”

Chris puts on the headlights, and it is.

Snowing.

So we remain in our smelly, sealed-tight, frozen fart-mobile, snow slowly mounting around us, very cold, very wet, again very hungry and now very tired. Chris crawls over to me and puts her head in my lap, and we both try counting sheep.

Some three hours later, at around four in the morning, we are awakened by the bright lights of an emergency patrol truck pulling up behind us. A young, personable Canadian gets out, and we tell him our troubles.

He fills our empty tank fast enough and then charges us twenty-five dollars, which must be the going rate around New England these days for five gallons of hand-delivered gasoline.

But I have no cash left on me and damned anyway if I’m going to spring for another of Chris’ mishaps. So she begrudgingly writes out a check, ultimately even adding a two-dollar tip because she thinks the guy’s got sexy eyes.

I announce that I’m going to drive, and Chris grows mutinous, claiming
she
paid for the gas, thus giving her the same driving rights and permissions allotted me when I last coughed up the cash.

“All right, Chris, you drive. At this point I don’t care if we ever get there.”

And from the looks of things, perhaps we won’t. It’s stillsnowing heavily, has been for three hours, and there are as many accumulated inches. But neither sleet nor snow nor dark of night can deter Mad Wheels from her appointed rounds and we are soon snowplowing toward Stowe.

A ride that would normally, under ideal conditions, take a little over half an hour between Montpelier and Stowe takes, this early morning, almost two. We turn off the main highway at Waterbury, heading for Stowe just as the first hint of early light appears. It still snows heavily, turning the countryside lovely in all-white. And driving isn’t too bad as the road here has been recently plowed.

Steady at the wheel, Chris mentions how peaceful, lovely, serene and inviting is Vermont. .. and how happy she is to be here, away from all the hassles of the city.

And as we pull off the highway and up the long, snow-laden winding drive leading to the Lewises’ house, on this cold, gray, clouded morning, I see that my watch reads seven fifteen.

Pointing out the hour to Chris, I ask, “What do you suppose Maggie and Douglas will have to say about our being over fourteen hours late?”

“What
can
they say? I’m sure they’ll agree we made remarkably good time considering how much trouble we had.”

Logic to which I can find no adequate response.

Chapter Four
 

Perhaps the ultimate test of a really good friend is one who doesn’t mind being aroused at some absurdly early hour. Bleary-eyed and not yet quite awake, Maggie Lewis opens the door and has the decency to greet us most warmly, even if she hasn’t begun to focus yet and has absolutely no idea who we are.

We exchange hugs and kisses but no hellos. It’s too early for words. At last, Maggie drowsily says, “You’re late.”

“Yes!” answers Chris, beaming with pride.

“Very,” mutters Maggie, one eye opening.

“Very what?” asks Chris blandly.

“You’re very late.” Two eyes. “How come?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Oh.”

There is a twenty-second or so lapse in this stimulating conversation, during which time I get the feeling Maggie may be falling back to sleep.

Her eyes close for several moments, and when at last they open again, she mutters, “Come in.”

Fifteen minutes later we’re sitting in front of the fireplace, warming ourselves, sipping freshly brewed coffee.

Maggie, trying to convince us she’s finally awake, talks incessantly. “There was no problem waiting. Douglas and I figured between you two driving up together, so much could go wrong, we hadn’t planned to start worrying until next Tuesday. So I curled up by the fireplace while Douglas, the insensitive monster, went to bed.”

“I am not an insensitive monster!” says a voice behind us. “I am a pussycat!”

We all turn to find Douglas, standing at the foot of the staircase, bathrobed and indignant.